Yelp’s New Wordmap Helps You Avoid Hipsters

Yelp announced a new feature called “Wordmap” that allows users to search cities by keyword so they can discover (or avoid) certain areas they live in or would like to visit. This heatmap works by extracting keyword density of Yelp reviews all over a city, and the patterns in the maps are pretty entertaining, at the very least.

Yelp, first, I want to thank you for allowing me to identify the hipster areas of cities I visit ahead of time. I can’t tell you how much trouble that’s going to save me. I checked the validity of the information against L.A.’s hipster mecca, and yep, it’s accurate:

You can also cross-reference the hipster area with the “PBR” search, just to verify where the largest concentration of hipsters will be at any given time in the neighborhood:

Voice search is growing exponentially, and when something becomes this prominent it behoves the major search engines to make changes to the ways they work to make these experiences more fluid and enjoyable for the end user. Jamie Pitman reviews consumers' current use of voice search with regard to local search and how you can optimize for future growth